that radiated from His cross on earth?  Is it too presumptuous to think and say, that such pictures will be as precious in His sight as any graven by the lives of angels on their outward or homeward flights of duty and delight?  These are they, therefore, that shall give to the earth all the immortality to which it shall attain.  These are they that shall take up into the brilliant existence of the hereafter, ten thousand sections of its corporeity; portions of its surface, perhaps, as substantial as the human form that the souls of men shall wear in another world.  These are they that shall shine as the stars, when those beaming so brilliantly in our eyes around the shrines of mere intellect and genius, shall have “paled their ineffectual fires” before the efflux of diviner light.  Let him, then, of thoughtful and attentive faculties think on these great and holy possibilities, when he treads within the pale of a good man’s life, whose labors for human happiness “follow him” according to divine promise; not out of the world, not down into the grave with his resting body, but out among living generations, breathing upon them and through them a blessed and everlasting influence.  Let him tread that disk of light reverentially, for it is the holiest place on the earth’s surface outside the immediate circumference of Cavalry.

This is Babraham; and here lived Jonas Webb; a good man and true, whose influence and usefulness had a broader circumference than the widest empire in the world.  A Frenchman has written the fullest history of both, and an American here offers reverentially a tribute to his worth.  The light of his life was a soft and gentle illumination on its earth-side; the lustre of the other was revealed only by partial glimpses to those who leaned closest to him in the testing-moments of his higher nature.  He was one of the great benefactors, whose lives and labors become the common inheritance of mankind, and whose names go down through long generations with a pleasant memory.  To a certain extent, he was to the great primeval industry of the world, what Arkwright, Watts, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse were each to the mechanical and scientific activities of the age.  He did as much, perhaps, as any man that ever preceded him, to honor that industry, and lift it up to the level of the first occupations of modern times, which had claimed higher qualities of intelligence, genius and enterprize.  He was a farmer, and his ancestors had been farmers from time immemorial.  He did not bound into the occupation as an enthusiastic amateur, who had acquired a large fortune by manufacturing or commercial enterprize, which he was eager to lavish upon bold and uncertain experiments.  He attained his highest eminence by the careful gradations of a continuous experience, reaching back far into the labors of his ancestors.  The science, skill and judgment he brought to bear upon his operations, came from his reading, thinking, observations and experiments